Many of us have had problems with Google sending 50% or more of our pages to Supplementals. My own situation has improved a great deal, but it’s far from perfect. I’ve tried an SEO plugin I found, but it hasn’t helped as much as I’d have liked.

One of the the changes I have tried is creating original archives pages with an excerpt tool that allows you to configure the length, break points, etc.. of the excerpts that show up. Take a look at any of my categories, and you’ll see the first 120 words posted.

This is a big improvement over the first archives as the full post was made available there. There are still some kinks to be worked out: like how to show more than 3 posts (set by the options in “Reading”), what can I do with my Google Ads, and how long is long enough so that Google doesn’t treat the page as a mere copy of content elsewhere.

You can find the plugin at http://guff.szub.net/2005/02/26/the-excerpt-reloaded/ but the plugin looks a little dated now. Still, I’m finding it working well in Version 2.2 of WP. You should, too.

(This post has been edited with this paragraph. Also the publication date has been changed to 6/29 which was intended, but my posting system screwed up royally).

Well, it seems that the queues for an Iphone aren’t only at the stores. Matt reports that activation of the service is S L O W…. I suggest you save yourself the hassle, and wait three months until the kinks are worked out of the system. It’s stupid to put yourself through this ‘ordeal’ (the words of one customer for an Iphone just to get it first!). Of course, you could just pay 35% or more and buy it on Ebay.

I’ve been making videos for my other blog for quite some time, but I thought that I would like to detail how I do this. Making videos is a time intensive task, I found, so any way I can cut corners, I might consider.

You need your source of your own video: a camera, DV-videocamera or webcam (even a mobile phone). If you are using XP, you’ll find Windows MovieMaker quite sufficient for a beginner’s level. You can organise the scenes, add effects, but you won’t have that much control of the video editing itself, apart from cutting scenes, etc. You can’t actually do much else. Still, it’s a good place to start.

I found these tools quite helpful to make some of the videos on my other website.

Bink: “Bink is a hybrid block-transform and wavelet codec that can encode your video using 16 different compression techniques (wavelet, DCT, motion compensation, a variety of vector quantizers, Smacker-style, etc). With all of these techniques in one codec, Bink can handle any type of video.”

VCDGear: “VCDGear is a program designed to allow a user to extract MPEG streams from CD images, convert VCD files to MPEG, correct MPEG errors, and more — all in a single step. Initially developed back in late 1997, the program has grown to do various extractions, conversions, and corrections on the fly. Cross-platform support will allow different machines to process and generate output that is compatible between one another.” It’s very helpful to grab data from VCD (esp. if like us, you have old videos made before DVDs became commonplace, unfortunately, it can’t add back the data that was stripped out, so the quality won’t improve!).

TMPGEnc:TMPGEnc is a free AVI to MPEG1 encoder. It will allow you to make VCDs and DVDs easily. I haven’t tried it, because I was using NERO for encoding VCDs at the moment. But this would be worth trying.

SuperEXE v2007: helps with converting WMV files to AVI and other formats, including FLV formats for browsing and playing on the web. “If you need a simple, yet very efficient tool to convert (encode) or play any Multimedia file, without reading manuals or spending long hours training, then SUPER © is all you need. It is a Multimedia Encoder and a Multimedia Player, easy-to-use with 1 simple click.”

RIVA: This tool helps to “Transcode your existing videofiles to the advanced Flash Video (FLV) format with this free Riva FLV Encoder.” It can help if you wish to upload your video files to the web for playing in your browser.

There is some overlap between some of these tools, as one or two tools didn’t achieve the required effects. I also used VLC for some basic encoding, and I used other tools when I couldn’t get the desired effects.

None of these tools really help improve the actual quality of the individual camera work, but since I spent a lot of time trying to find them, I thought I should share with you!

If you know any other great tools, please add them in the comments! Thanks.